Recording dispatch, day one: crash pad luxury and the art of the snare

10 hours in the car. Arrive at the crash pad. Crash pad is the entire top floor of a two-story building that functions as a musicians' utopia. It's what a converted loft space would look like if lofts weren't terrible. There's a practice room, a record room, instruments strewn about all over the place, and plans to build a venue/bar on the bottom floor. The space is so large that no one bats an eye at the room with eight office cubicles. I slept in the cubicle normally reserved for the Blogger Outreach Coordinator.

After all those hours of driving, you always forget that the first six hours in the studio involve endless tinkering. The snare needs to be adjusted. The adjusted snare doesn't work; it needs to be removed for a replacement snare. The replacement snare needs to be adjusted. The whole drum kit needs to be replaced to complement the adjusted replacement snare. Then you realize that the original adjusted snare is a better fit for the replacement kit than the adjusted replacement snare. And it's still too early to fire up Castlevania.

After the initial jitters, however, we hit our stride at around 9 pm. It took about 30 tries to get "No Stranger to Heartache" down. Little parts of the arrangement kept changing, and we record as a unit, so there's no cutting and pasting. We nailed "Come On", however, in one take. It went so smoothly that I didn't even get a chance to remember my bass part at the end. Forget what I said about cutting and pasting.

At 11:30, we retired to a bar across the street from the crash pad in Fountain Square. Remember when I implied that Indy wasn't that interesting? I may have to retract that statement based on the attractions of the square. It's all revitalized Art Deco, the bars and restaurants seducing you with their stately beauty. It conjures up visions of what midwestern downtowns must have looked like in the 1950s, before the highway system and the suburbs tore them apart. Good concepts, however, have a habit of coming back around.